The Rise of the Personal Cloud

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, but I do have a prediction for this year: 2014 will usher in the rise of the personal cloud. The “cloud” is bandied about endlessly in technology. Everything is going into the cloud. Outside the technorati, few people can even define what the cloud is and many simply assume that this must be happening.

Right now, as we sit here everything is going into the cloud. Of course, this is far from true. In the enterprise world, it is certainly an undeniable trend -- it offers tremendous benefit to businesses today. However, in the consumer world data is quite slow to move into the cloud. How can that be when companies like Dropbox have hundreds of millions of users?

The reality is that people upload only a small percentage of their overall content (files) into the cloud. According to Gartner, consumers put just over 7% of their files into the cloud. Why? There are several reasons, not least of which are cost, complexity and privacy/security concerns. The personal cloud is the consumer-centric alternative that gives people power over their content and I predict 2014 to be the year the consumer voice changes from a murmur to a loud chorus.

What Is a Personal Cloud?

All clouds are not created equal, and while there are many cloud technologies and vendors, there are three main types of clouds. By far the most common is the Public Cloud. Public cloud services include Box, Dropbox and Google Drive, but also Waze and Flickr. What makes those clouds public? Specifically, it is the fact that my data is stored right next to your data, along with everyone else’s data.

Private Clouds, of course, are a bit different in that they are typically built for a specific group of people, for example your employer. In such cases, only those people would have access to that cloud -- it is kept separate from the public. Finally, at least for this discussion, there is the Personal Cloud. Services like younity create a personal cloud for me, or for you, or for someone else, but not any of us together. Built from my own hardware and software, this cloud is entirely mine and no one else’s.

There are several reasons consumers are slow to move into the cloud, and certainly each of these deserves significant attention -- far more than this short article can accommodate. We’ll be dedicating future discussions to each one of these, but let's briefly enumerate three key reasons here.

Cost

This is the biggest reason consumer data is slowly moving into the cloud. People have lots of data, spread across lots of devices. Gartner suggests the typical household had in excess of 1TB of content in 2013 and that will rise to over 3.3TB per household by 2016. Other estimates are far higher. While cloud storage is getting cheaper each year – over the last many years, the low cost leaders in the space (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) have reduced their prices on average about 30-40% each year – the growth in consumer data is growing faster at nearly 50% year over year. Storing all your data in the public cloud will cost you hundreds of dollars per year and increase each year for the foreseeable future.

Privacy and Security

Revelations that many governments of the world are able to collect personal data on-demand has called into question our desire and need to keep everything online. While we want to access and share our content, we want privacy and security as well. Whether it is photos on a social network or work documents in an online storage account, we want to know that we have absolute control of our data because it is ours, regardless of what services we use and regardless of how they choose to manage their Terms of Service.

Public cloud services store all content together -- yours, mine and everybody else’s. Whether it is a government agency or a group of hackers, this creates a compelling target as a one-stop-shop for information. To minimize this risk, consumers need to understand the intricacies of security, such as client-side encryption and other methods that increase your data’s security and privacy. Unfortunately, few people care enough about this to take their security into their own hands and even if you do care it is a hard subject to stay current on. Simply not giving your data to a vendor is a simple option.

Complexity

People these days are almost universally multi-device users. There are roughly 250M people in the US alone with 3 or more computing devices (Forrester) and there are roughly three times as many devices per household as there are people (NPD). With so much content spread across this many devices, simplicity is critical. Current cloud services universally require consumers to manage what content is where. Furthermore, these services seem to maintain data in device specific ways; one device is treated different from another and instead of building an ecosystem we are stuck with a multitude of fragmented systems. This isn’t how people use devices though.

The devices we buy are increasingly contextual -- I can’t imagine writing this on anything but a laptop or desktop, yet if I want to find a restaurant while I’m on the street I grab my phone). This is a positive trend, but results in a shifting focus -- one that revolves around the screen we use to access content, but not the device. Segregation of data by device or even by stored location means that complexity increases by giving us more to manage. Cloud services also tend to focus on files and not on libraries and this is the biggest failure. Media is typically library based -- music playlists, photo albums, etc. Devices are slowly becoming cheap pieces of commodity hardware that we replace regularly.

In each of the above cases, the personal cloud delivers enormous benefits over the public cloud. At a minimum, they never store your data online, which affords a massive cost savings to be passed on. This also means that your data remains yours -- it can’t be seen, touched or commandeered by anyone. Ever. Lastly, an elegant personal cloud reduces complexity instead of increasing it, because these are built off your hardware and online services. So instead of having one more piece of equipment or another place to put the same files, you can make your existing devices simply work together better.

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The concerns of privacy and security in public clouds are increasingly top of mind for many consumers. However, it is not just individuals that worry about it. Businesses are even more concerned about their sensitive files being stored in public clouds. Many industry pundits are predicting that 2014 will also see the growing rise of private enterprise clouds for file sharing. Case in point, the announcement yesterday of kiteworks by Accellion is a strong indication of a business market that is looking for mobile solutions that provide superb end user experiences, and still deliver high levels of security and privacy via private clouds.